Knock-Knock. ‘Who’s There?’ Ice-Pick Lodge. ‘Uh-Oh.’

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Ice-Pick Lodge tend to pop up when you least expect them, with the game you least expect them to make. They’ve been sensibly resistant to attempting another Pathologic, instead darting off to create new specimens of the weird, the wonderful and the intimidatingly odd. The enormous success they so richly deserve has eluded them, which means a move to Kickstarter is probably sensible. True to form, the project they’re proposing, a game called Knock-Knock, is bat-shit weird – but at the same time, I think it’s the most mainstream-friendly they’ve yet been. Not in a bad way, though.

Knock-Knock is the Evil Dead meets hide & seek, as a malevolent-faced hermit tries to evade monstrous ‘Guests’ to his cabin in the woods. It immediately puts me somewhat in mind of Slender, but with rather more DIRECT ACTION and an art style that evokes 80s children’s cartoons from that alternate evil dimension on the other side of the mirror we’re never supposed to mention.
Bless ’em, they even have a creepy backstory for the game’s genesis. They received crazed notes from a mysterious ‘gentleman and scholar’ begging IPL to create a game from it: “The surface examination did not reveal anything straightforwardly terrifying, yet we could not escape the feeling that something truly sinister was lurking underneath.” So, of course, they went for it.

The goal on each level is to survive ‘a night’, which entails about 10 minutes of hiding, constructing barricades and finding/using randomly-placed items to keep yourself safe from harm as all manner of things that go bump in the night terrorise your home from both outside and in. Here’s a taste:

Their Kickstarter reward tiers are similarly playful/obtuse. The reward for $47 is a mystery, $100 gets you a special tree in the forest which will be deemed your ‘surrogate’, while $1000 lets you add your best scary stories into the in-game journal.

They’re after $30k to do this, going on the video have a fair chunk of something to work with, and are currently $1400 in with 46 days left. More details/mad wibbling may be found here. More artwork, meanwhile, is here.

Yeah, anything which reminds me of Clock Tower instantly hops in to my list of “games to be very aware of”. Not enough games remind me of Clock Tower, which is a shame, since Clock Tower was bloody brilliant.

I never played Pathologic, but I remember avidly reading about it on RPS and elsewhere a few years ago. If Knock-Knock has a similar atmosphere to that, with some fort-building, shelter-seeking, DayZ-esque survival thrown in, it could be fantastic.

It seems to be Russians generally. There seem to be some sort of unwritten rules about what you can and can’t do in a computer game that all western developers have signed up to, but Russians look on them in the same way they look on a rule that says you shouldn’t drink the anti-freeze from your tank just because you’ve run out of vodka. More a sort of guideline.

Ice Pick Lodge shouldn’t need a Kickstarter. I thought their games were moderately successful. I guess their last game didn’t get too many sales, but I really enjoyed it. Anyways, Kickstarter is a bad idea if you already have most of the money because it takes at least five percent but more likely a lot more than that from the money you earn.

I don’t know what you mean… Kickstarter takes nothing out of what you “earn”, it takes a cut from investment money. If you can’t find traditional investors it’s better than sitting on your thumbs and weeping softly.

I think what he meant was that all of the money through Kickstarter is essentially a preorder, so that money is from people who won’t be purchasing the product after it is launched. Kickstarter then takes 5% of this money.

On the one hand 5% is a tiny cut compared to a normal distributor, but they also lose money from offering the preorders at a discount, as well as any backer bonuses that need to produced like t-shirts.

Having taken an entire econ class my freshman year of college, I feel qualified to say that depending on how you run your kickstarter, the actual percentage of the money backers give that ends in your company’s pocket can vary.

One of the other quirks about kickstarter is that when you preorder, they tell you how many other people need to pre-order before the game can be made, and give you the option of giving them more cash to make sure it happens, and generally, the ability to pay even more to upgrade the game you’ll be getting.

This encourages people to stick in cash when they’d otherwise pay the normal preorder amount and then go somewhere else.

This part is something that game developers can do, and it’s basically the engine that powers dwarf fortress.

I suspect this model of game design is also very compatible with agile principles; make a small game for a small audience, then expand it and improve it as the audience grows, and let people who’ve already pre-ordered know how you’re hoping to expand your ambition if you get more cash.

The other big deal of kickstarter is that it’s like preordering a game, but you get the money back if it never comes out. This also encourages more spending, because the risk is basically removed.

This is a lot harder to do. You can reverse engineer it from amazon’s payment system to create your own baby kickstarter, but at that point, you’re getting a bit dodgy, and you might as well use kickstarter itself for exposure.

Y’know what Ice Pick Lodge should Kickstart? Paying a translator to do an improved translation of Pathologic. That’s definitely something I’d be willing to throw money at.

I’ll most likely throw money at this as well (as it looks bloody great), but as someone above pointed out this will no doubt get made without Kickstarter whereas a Pathologic translation is something that almost certainly wouldn’t get done without it.

Ont their website there’s two Paypal links, one for Knock-knock (for those who want to donate outside the Kickstarter system), and a generic “Ice-Pick” one, for people who just want to throw money at their general direction, for whatever project they’re going to do next. I presume this includes a possible “technologically modern remake of Pathologic” as they mentioned on there (I guess that would also include a proper translation).

I don’t think that’s supposed to be an actual representation of current psychological treatment practices any more than Mr. Assface is supposed to be a representation of current physiological practices. It’s just an invocation of constraint, despair, and horror. Granted, it’s a cliched invocation, but it’s still just an invocation.

Come to think of it, said cliche might represent the fear of institutional psychiatry, and it’s pretty valid in that regard. Still, the creature itself as a videogame monster is sort of meh. This is only concept art though, will have to see it in-game.

These guys are legends already. Although I sort of wished some helpful ex-people from Rare or someone jumped on to give Cargo a bit of a spit-shine to the ‘feel’ and maybe soften the poetic obtuseness some (give the pilot more personality). Could have been a bit of a crossover hit, I thought.

Today I have just put $30 on Ouya and $30 on penny-arcade going CC and ads free and now you tell me one of my favorite game studios is asking for money? C’mon! I’m not made of dollar signs! And the worst part is that being a Kickstarter they need to spoil it first, :/ You don’t want to have an Ice-Pick Lodge game spoiled.

Now let’s see if they have a DRM-free option and to throw more dollar signs at my screen.

This site first brought IPL’s game’s to my attention. They’re all wonderful, weird games. Pathologic and The Void of the most challenging games I’ve completed-not exactly difficult because of their mechanics, but because of the energy they required the player to give. They made me reconsider why I play video games. I want to see these guys continue to innovate, so I pitched in $47.

I think this will be the first kickstarter I actually open the bank account for. Can’t really think of a better use for the service than allowing IPL to make the sorts of games they have proven themselves capable of.

Well I’ve made a £32/$50 pledge. Pathologic is a game I played a long time ago and it freaked me the shit out. I then replayed it after reading the RPS articles and it freaked me the shit out all over again.
It was one of the ugliest looking but atmospheric and brilliant playing games I’ve ever had the joy of playing.

Void was incredibly atmospheric again but it was notoriously difficult. I had many frustrated moments with it but it was always worth it.

Cargo is the only game by them I haven’t spent a great deal of time with. I’ve only played it for around half an hour but just always had something else to play. I really should play it, Ice-Pick have never let me down yet.

Pathologic was so difficult for me, even with a walk through. Fighting was nearly impossible, and as the game went on you had to fight quite a bit. At the same time, because of the hunger mechanic, it’s the only game that I feel really gets creeping despair across. I remember breaking into someone’s house to steal a small cracker because I was getting so hungry. I had to stop for a moment and think, my god what am I doing?!

The Void is tough as hell. I got pretty far into the map, but eventually had to deal with a brother and that did NOT go well.

I had the same experience as you with Cargo, except I kind of stop playing because my character got stock at a specific height in the landscape and could neither dive under the ocean, nor climb very high on an island. I just kind of ran a few feet above sea level. The review here mentioned that you could practically hear it sputtering and spitting out sparks when you started it up. Ice Pick Lodge needs some stability in their games.

Oh wow.
I’ve already purchased every Ice-Pick Lodge game including three editions of The Void, simply as a way to support this unique crew in some way. These new kickstarter and tip jar pretty much ensure that I’m going to lose some part of my income to the studio on regular basis from now on.
And I didn’t even *like* Cargo and The Void that much!
Help…

This looks pretty nice, like an old school run-away arcade game mixed with that zomby mode from cod.

If they can make it so that getting clues on what the poltergiest is doing is really subtle, then that could add a nice extra level of depth, where the really advanced players keep running from room to room looking for changes, and get a panicky skill based game even if no monsters appear. Then you could make success or failure successively more random the worse things get, ie the more stuff gets in, meaning that skill based players will try to avoid this randomness at all cost.